The doctrine of sin—its origin, nature, consequences, and the different ways Scripture describes human rebellion against God.
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 06071 This question is one of the more practically pressing ones in Christian sexual ethics, and it is one Scripture does not answer directly. The word masturbation does not appear in the Bible. Any honest answer has to begin there, because the temptation — in both directions — is to pretend more certainty than…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 06072 This is one of those pastoral questions where a great deal of unnecessary guilt and confusion has accumulated because the distinction between two very different things has been blurred. Many sincere Christians live under a burden of condemnation about their own normal human responses, whilst the genuinely problematic territory of lust goes unaddressed…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 06069 The question of whether some sins are worse than others touches something most people intuitively sense but find difficult to reason through biblically. Instinctively, most people feel that murder is worse than petty dishonesty, that premeditated cruelty is worse than a moment of impatience. But there is also the uncomfortable teaching that all…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 06070 The Old Testament does not use a single word for sin. It uses a rich vocabulary of overlapping terms that together paint a more complete picture of what sin actually is than any single word could capture. Three of those terms recur throughout the Hebrew Scriptures — and significantly, they appear together in…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 06067 The practice of confession sits at the intersection of theology and daily Christian experience. Most believers know they should confess sin to God, but questions arise about whether that private prayer is all that is ever required — or whether Scripture sometimes calls for something more. The answer is more layered than a…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 09024 Few pastoral situations are more delicate or more important than the question of what the church should do when a member sins publicly. Get it wrong in one direction — moving too quickly, too harshly, or with the wrong spirit — and the church becomes a place of fear rather than grace. Get…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 08084 The Bible presents Satan as genuinely active in relation to human sin: not a mere symbol of moral evil but a personal, intelligent adversary with specific strategies and identifiable methods. It is equally clear that his activity never removes human responsibility. Both halves of that picture are essential, and collapsing either one distorts…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 6018 Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians contains one of the most practically searching distinctions in the New Testament. Writing about the response of the Corinthian church to a previous letter of correction, he draws a line between two kinds of sorrow over sin that feel superficially similar but move in completely opposite directions….
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 6019 Jeremiah 17:9 is one of the most searching verses in the Old Testament: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” It is the kind of statement that either strikes the reader as obviously true or provokes significant resistance, depending on how comfortable they are with a…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 6015 The word “world” appears hundreds of times across the New Testament, and it does not always mean the same thing. Reading it as if it did produces significant confusion, particularly in passages that seem to say contradictory things. John 3:16 says God loved the world; 1 John 2:15 says do not love the…